Business: Contruent
Address: 55 Shuman Blvd., Naperville
Phone/website: 630-318-0444, www.contruent.com
CEO: Ryan Kubacki, 50, of Naperville
Years in business: 20
What does your business do? “It’s called ‘capital project management software.’ We have software that helps people manage extremely large construction projects,” Kubacki said.
How large? “We have all the high-speed rail throughout England. The subways in Toronto. Mining in Australia. Redesigning Athens. … Oftentimes, they are civil engineering projects, public infrastructure. Or they’re just very large projects. … We do a lot of oil and gas (companies) as they’re building new clean energy facilities. We do a lot of energy companies as they’re looking at alternative energy like solar wind farms. … It tends to be anybody that is building a project north of $1 billion.”
Any local projects? “We’re just breaking into the U.S. We hired a new sales team. There are couple (clients, but) I can’t say yet. One of them is a really amazing oil and gas company building clean energy facilities and they’re using Contruent software to manage that. A large utility company just signed up with us.”
Why is your company important? “These are extremely complex projects. There are thousands of suppliers. We provide software that helps them automate it and keep track of it so they can be on time and on budget. … There’s a great consequence of getting it right. … I’m a software guy. Software has completely revolutionized every industry on the planet except for construction. … It’s an opportunity to completely automate how we do these large projects. It’s very difficult.”
Was it always called Contruent? “We used to be called Ares Prism until last January, Applied Research Engineering Sciences, a very large engineering design firm founded in 1992. … It was built by engineers for engineers. They started selling (software) about 20 years ago. We bought Ares Prism in October of 2021. … We rebranded it Contruent. It’s the true visibility of construction.”
What’s the back story? “I co-invested in this company with an investment firm, M33 Growth. We moved it from San Francisco to Naperville. At the time, we had a very small space on the 10th floor. In the 15 months since then, we’ve grown and have a good chunk of the second floor.”
Why Naperville? “I love Naperville. I think this is a great place to grow the technology business. It provides access to great talent. Almost all this team is from Naperville. … We hired people from North Central College. … It’s very accessible to O’Hare. This is a global business. We have clients in 26 countries. … And, we can entertain here. It’s such an awesome downtown.”
Photo credit: Steve Metsch/Naperville Sun
To read the full piece, please visit: Down to Business: Software firm specializes in streamlining complex construction projects: ‘The best team always wins’ (chicagotribune.com)